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DICAEOPOLIS
Spectators, be not angered if, although I am a beggar, I dare in
a Comedy to speak before the people of Athens of the public weal;
Comedy too can sometimes discern what is right. I shall not please,
but I shall say what is true. Besides, Cleon shall not be able to accuse
me of attacking Athens before strangers;1 we are by ourselves at the festival of the Lenaea; the period when our allies send us their tribute
and their soldiers is not yet. Here is only the pure wheat
without chaff; as to the resident strangers settled among us, they
and the citizens are one, like the straw and the ear.

I detest the Lacedaemonians with all my heart, and may Poseidon,
the god of Taenarus,2 cause an earthquake and overturn their dwellings!
My vines also have been cut. But come (there are only friends who
hear me), why accuse the Laconians of all our woes? Some men (I do not
say the city, note particularly that I do not say the city), some
wretches, lost in vices, bereft of honour, who were not even
citizens of good stamp, but strangers, have accused the Megarians of
introducing their produce fraudulently, and not a cucumber, a leveret,
a suck[l]ing pig, a clove of garlic, a lump of salt was seen without its
being said, “Halloa! these come from Megara,” and their being
instantly confiscated. Thus far the evil was not serious and we were
the only sufferers. But now some young drunkards go to Megara and
carry off the courtesan Simaetha; the Megarians, hurt to the quick, run
off in turn with two harlots of the house of Aspasia; and so for three
gay women Greece is set ablaze. Then Pericles, aflame with ire on his
Olympian height, let loose the lightning, caused the thunder to
roll, upset Greece and passed an edict, which ran like the song, “That
the Megarians be banished both from our land and from our markets
and from the sea and from the continent.”3 Meanwhile the Megarians,
who were beginning to die of hunger, begged the Lacedaemonians to bring
about the abolition of the decree, of which those harlots were the
cause; several times we refused their demand; and from that time there
was horrible clatter of arms everywhere.

1The Babylonians had been produced at a time of year when Athens was crowded with strangers; The Acharnians, on the contrary, was played in December.

2Sparta had been menaced with an earthquake in 427 B.C. Poseidon was ‘The Earthshaker,’ god of earthquakes, as well as of the sea.

3 A song by Timocreon the Rhodian, the words of which were practically identical with Pericles' decree.